NOTES FROM A RIVER RAT – Thank ol' Father John

Wednesday

Mar 6, 2013 at 10:55 AMMar 7, 2013 at 8:00 AM

In pre-oil money days in Alaska, we game wardens didn't have a lot of equipment.

Stephen Reynolds

In pre-oil money days in Alaska, we game wardens didn't have a lot of equipment. Not having an airplane at that time, I needed to figure out other ways to cover the country. I didn't have a river boat either, and there were many miles of navigable rivers that had never seen a game warden closer than two thousand feet above the treetops.

The local Episcopal priest, Father John Phillips, was a friend. He lived in the Tanana River village of Nenana, the major jumping-off port for Interior Alaska. It's where the only inland railroad cuts across a Yukon River artery, a replenishment station for the villages, where the old sternwheelers were once based, replaced now by the diesel powered tugs. If you were a kid in Nenana, you probably aspired to being a riverboat captain or an engineer on the train. You didn't think about having a car – you thought about having a riverboat of your own. It would be maybe 24 feet long, narrow, of sturdy timbered plywood and two-by-fours, with a lift for raising the motor while you skimmed over shallow bars. You would build the boat yourself, under the tutelage of an oldtimer, and the materials and motor you would purchase with forest firefighting money. In Nenana the flatbottomed river boats lined the silt bank like rafts of basking alligators along a Louisiana bayou.

Father John owned one of these boats, and we struck a deal. He'll loan me his boat and motor two or three days at a time; I'll give him a barrel of gas in trade. It gets me out onto the river. What I learn on the river, reading the water, will be of value when I start flying with floats. Winding, swirling, driftinfested, muddy river; bobbing widow makers just beneath the surface, anchored trees ready to spear an unsuspecting hull. Watch for the big boils, they're OK, that's where the water's deepest – read where the big water-volume is likely to flow, cutbank to cutbank. That's where spruce tree sweepers lay horizontal, slapping the current.

I like the story told by my friend, Leroy. He and a friend spot a humongous hornets' nest on the end of a bushy sweeper. This is the plan: We'll rip by that nest full speed; you take one of the oars and wallop that sucker – ha, ha ... them little devils will be madder'n ... well, madder'n wet hornets, ha, ha, ha. They do that; Leroy rips by there at 20 miles an hour, the friend raises up and clobbers the nest, whap! But the big nest lands in the bow of the boat. Ha, ha, ha. Thirty million screaming hornets. Leroy runs the boat up on the bank, abandons it to the winners, and almost doesn't live through it. It is years before he can talk about it and even crack a smile.

If you smell bad, get out on the river and blow away the stink, they say. Well, I don't know about that, but you can sure blow away the mosquitoes. However, the bitin' little devils will get you sooner or later – you have to come to the beach sometime. I always dope up with repellent before pulling into the bank (you only jump ashore and try to tie up a boat once, without doping up first, to know why).

I learn the river. Miles of it. The state trooper Lyle Nygren and I use Father John's boat to get to the village of New Minto. They're building the first road into that country from Fairbanks. The people will need drivers' licenses before they can drive the road. Nobody has one. They've been sent manuals to study. Lyle is smart when we get there: He will give the written tests; I'll give the driving tests.

There is an old surplus military four-by-four left there by the government housing construction crew. The villagers have been practicing with the truck which has no brakes. We simulate driving city streets and keep it in compound gear, that way you just let off on the gas to stop, then catch the dying engine with the clutch. Stop lights, stop signs, parking places don't exist. Pretend there's an intersection here with a stop sign and you want to turn left. All of this on a muddy trail through the village; people getting their driver's licenses, 16 to 65. Fairbanks, do we have some surprises coming your way!

There's a Fish and Game cabin in the Minto Lakes area, not far from the village. We retreat there at the end of a day, enjoying some pike fishing on the way – good, white, flaky meat – watch the Ybones. These northern pike throughout the flat land of the Minto Lakes grow to three and four feet. We don't catch any like that, but it charges the blood just knowing they are there.

Fall time on the Minto: birchblazed forest of saffron and burnt sienna. The duck hunters from Fairbanks descend by the floatplane load, pick up their cached riverboats and charge around the bends, hellbent, blasting through fleeing waterfowl, shotguns blazing. Game warden sitting there with a citation book. Surprise. Take your ticket like a man; thank ol' Father John, amen.

– Stephen Reynolds was a game warden in New Mexico and Alaska, and now lives along the Little Shasta River. His books, including "From a Bush Wing: Notes of an Alaska Wildlife Trooper," are available at Amazon.com.